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I was home for the holidays, Thanksgiving to be exact, and my sister was watching Drop Dead Gorgeous. I had seen it in the theatre and thought it only mildly successful. However, I did watch the last half of it again. Some good laughs, for free on the small screen, with beloveds around and a fire in the fireplace. Anyway, I adore, adore, adore Kirsten Dunst, but I really noticed Brittany Murphy. And towards the end of the film, I remembered what was the funniest line in the movie. Brittany's dad is saying how his son is better than her. The dad doesn't know the son is gay. So, Brittany says "Kevin's gay, Dad." And then pauses and screams, "GAAAAYYYY!!!" That is when I first thought of the idea to make her my next Person of the Week. She's very sexy and playful and very funny. Her mouth, her lips kind of curl up in this quivering way and it's all very endearing. Of course, everyone who knows of Brittany Murphy knows her as Tai in the film Clueless. She also does the voice of Luanne on the TV cartoon program, Home from the Hill. Or something like that. Brittany Murphy was born to Sharon Murphy on November 10th, 1977 in Atlanta GA. (Her parents later divorced.) Murphy was raised by her mother in Edison, New Jersey. She now lives with her mother, in Los Angeles. She grew up in the NY/NJ area but later moved to Burbank, CA. She graduated from John Burroughs High School. A precocious child who began putting on shows when she was a toddler, Murphy was acting in regional theatre productions by the age of nine. She also performed a song in the play, Les Miserables, while attending Herbert Hoover Middle School in Edison, NJ. She also was in the musical Really Rosie and was quite smashing! As a preteen she hired a manager and began making commercials before moving to Hollywood in 1991, in 1990 she landed her first television role, on the sitcom Blossom. Once in Hollywood, Brittany landed a role on the TV sitcom Drexell's Class, and the following year she made her film debut in the dysfunctional family drama Family Prayers. Murphy's talent for portraying all sorts of dysfunction was further exhibited in such films as Clueless; the Reese Witherspoon trailer trash odyssey Freeway (1996); and the made-for-TV David and Lisa (1998). Murphy won particular acclaim for her work in the last film; the story of two emotionally troubled teens (Murphy and Lukas Haas) who reach out to each other allowed the actress to prove herself in a purely dramatic role. In 1999, Murphy could again be seen portraying an emotionally damaged character in Girl,Interrupted, in which she played a patient at a mental institution. That same year, she explored the collective insanity of the beauty pageant world in Drop Dead Gorgeous, playing a pageant contestant who'd rather be living it up in New York with her cross-dressing brother. On the small screen that year, she switched to much darker fare with the Holocaust drama The Devil's Arithmetic. In addition to the praise she has received for her film portrayals, Murphy has won a different sort of acclaim for the work she has done on the animated TV series King of the Hill. As the voice of the Hills' beauty school sex kitten niece Luanne, the actress earned the kind of recognition that can only come from an animated character who was named one of the sexiest women on television by a major men's magazine. In February 2000, she appeared [with "Girl, Interrupted" costar Winona Ryder] in "The Vagina Monologues", reading a chilling story of a Bosnian woman's rape camp experiences. She appeared with Anthony LaPaglia in the Tony-winning revival of "A View from the Bridge".
During the filming of "Girl, Interrupted", the filmakers had to reshoot the scene in which Winona Ryder finds her after she commits suicide, because Winona was too good and Brittany couldn't help crying. Filmography TV Appearances |
